Airbnb hosts get a public terms page. Booking.com partners get an Accommodation Agreement, a commission percentage, and a long document called the General Delivery Terms. Booking.com reviews those terms twice a year. The full PDF sits behind the extranet. What is public is still enough to see who you are contracting with, what you promised, and where the money goes.
The stay is a contract between you and the guest. The shop window is a contract with Booking.com B.V. in Amsterdam. Dutch law governs it. Disputes go to the courts in Amsterdam unless a mandatory UK rule says otherwise.
This is a reading of the published partner terms and Partner Hub policies, not legal advice. If a clause matters to a live invoice or a removal, request your own GDT from Contracts in the extranet and read that copy.
Who you are contracting with
You sign as the “Accommodation”: the person or company named on the agreement, and the property it covers. Booking.com B.V. provides the reservation system, the promotion, the messaging tool and, if you join it, Payments by Booking.com.
Booking.com is not the landlord. The guest books you. You have to honour the reservation at the rate and conditions shown on the platform. If you cannot, you find an equal or better alternative and you pick up the extra cost.
The agreement runs indefinitely until someone ends it. Partner Hub policies are part of the contract, not optional reading.
What works in the partner’s favour
You set the rates, the cancellation rules and the house policies, within the GDT and the consumer-law rules on total price. Guests see a cancellation policy before they pay.
You can collect the money yourself or use Payments by Booking.com. Collect-yourself means a monthly commission invoice after departure, due in 14 days. Payments by Booking.com collects the guest’s card, deducts commission and a payment service fee, and pays you by bank transfer or virtual card. There is no setup fee. Booking.com says partners on that product see fewer cancellations and no-shows. The extra fee is the price of that convenience.
Force majeure is written in. If a disaster or a legal ban makes the trip impossible, guests can be moved or refunded without you charging them, and commission does not sit on the unused nights. That clause is for guest-side disruption. It is not a free pass for you to cancel.
Eligible home-like listings in the UK are enrolled in Partner Liability Insurance at no extra commission. The published limit for the UK is £1 million per incident for bodily injury or damage to a guest’s or neighbour’s property during a Booking.com stay. It does not cover damage to your own cottage. Direct bookings are outside it.
You can ask for a copy of the GDT. Booking.com emails a PDF to the contract contact within two working days.
The commission is not always 15 per cent
The percentage in your agreement is the starting point. For most UK holiday homes that base rate is around 15 per cent. It is charged on the room price: nights plus VAT or similar sales tax, plus extras the guest accepted before check-in. Cleaning fees, pet fees, extra-guest charges and breakfast sit in that pot. City tax usually does not.
You also pay commission when:
- The guest stayed and paid
- You keep money on a non-refundable or partly refundable cancellation
- You charge a no-show
- You overbook
You do not pay commission if you waive the cancellation or no-show fee and mark it in the extranet in time, usually within 48 hours of checkout. Miss that window and the invoice assumes you collected.
Overbooking is the nasty one. Commission is due because the room was offered on the platform, even if you waive the guest charge. There is a narrow waiver if the listing is under 30 days old or you have had fewer than five overbookings in 12 months. You still have to relocate the guest at your cost.
Preferred Partner and Visibility Booster add points on top of the base rate in return for placement. Genius is different. It does not raise the commission percentage. You fund a discount, usually 10 per cent on your cheapest and most popular unit, sometimes 15 or 20 per cent for higher Genius tiers. The badge and the filter are the trade. Stack Genius on Preferred and the take-home shrinks from both ends.
Payments by Booking.com then adds a payment service fee on bank-transfer payouts. The official pages do not publish one UK percentage. They say it tracks local card-processing rates and only applies to completed stays. Virtual-card payouts carry your own acquirer’s fee instead.
You are not supposed to cancel
The GDT is blunt. The accommodation does not cancel. Booking.com can cancel for fraud. If you cannot take the guest, you say so at once and you move them. Same-day problems have a short clock.
Fail to provide the room and you reimburse the guest or Booking.com for the extra cost. Booking.com can also compensate the guest for a material mismatch or a safety problem and invoice you.
That is a different shape from Airbnb’s host-cancellation fee ladder. Booking.com’s penalty is operational: you still owe commission on an overbooking, you pay the alternative room, and the review and the ranking take the hit.
Parity in the UK is narrower than the old hotel stories, and still in the contract
Booking.com no longer uses parity clauses in the EEA. The UK is not in the EEA. The public GDT definitions still list the United Kingdom as a narrow parity country. Narrow parity, in Booking.com’s own words, means the same or better rates and conditions on Booking.com as on your own online channels.
It is not wide parity. You are not contractually told to match every other OTA. You are told not to undercut Booking.com on the site you control.
Whether that clause is still worth fighting over in a UK court is a separate question. The 2024 EU court ruling and the Digital Markets Act changed the EEA. The UK position after Brexit is less tidy. We have covered that ground in the rate-parity piece. For day-to-day hosting the practical point is simpler: the current partner paperwork still talks as if your own website should not be cheaper than Booking.com for the same stay.
Genius eligibility in parity countries also asks for “competitive prices” on the platform compared with your own site.
Guest data is on loan
You get the guest’s details so you can run the stay. The messaging tool is for that stay, not for a newsletter. Unsolicited marketing to Booking.com guests is prohibited. If you do it, you indemnify Booking.com.
Industry readings of the GDT put a 30-day clock on access to that personal data after checkout or cancellation. After that the record is not yours to mine. An email address a guest hands you at the door is a different thing from the address Booking.com passed you to send the lockbox code.
Listings must not carry links out to other sites. Photos and copy have to be accurate and not misleading. Booking.com can edit, translate or drop content that breaks the rules. Reviews are governed by the GDT as well. You do not own the review thread.
Ranking is part of the contract
Annex language on ranking is unusually frank for a platform contract. Default order is personalised. Conversion, review score, availability, cancellation policy, price, content quality and commission percentage all feed the algorithm. Paying more, through Preferred or a booster, is an official lever. Offering Genius discounts is another.
That is the shop-window deal in one paragraph. Visibility is what you buy. The price of visibility is not only the base commission.
Liability, insurance and who pays when a guest is hurt
Partner Liability Insurance is real cover, for Booking.com stays only, for injury and third-party property damage. It is not buildings insurance. It is not theft of your sofa. It is not a direct-booking guest.
The GDT still expects you to hold the permits, the safety standards and the tax registrations the property needs. You indemnify Booking.com if a guest claim lands on them because of your listing or your stay. Booking.com’s own liability to you is limited in the usual platform way.
UK law still sits on top: planning, licensing where it applies, fire risk assessment, gas and electrical safety, business rates, UK GDPR. Booking.com’s partner pages on local rules are a pointer, not a substitute for the statute.
UK Digital Platform Reporting also sits on the account. Partners with a UK legal entity or a UK property have been told to complete Know Your Partner details for HMRC reporting. Miss the deadline and UK inventory can be closed to bookings.
What to do with all this
Read the commission line in your own agreement, not a forum average. Add Genius discounts and any Preferred uplift before you compare the channel with a site you own.
Mark no-shows and waived fees inside 48 hours. An unpaid cancellation that you forgot to flag still generates an invoice.
Keep Booking.com reservations on Booking.com. Do not put the cottage website in the listing or use the inbox as a mailing list.
If you also take direct bookings, put the rules on a page you control. Partner Liability Insurance will not follow those guests. Your own terms, your own payment link and your own insurance have to. A starting set of site terms is here: cottage.demo-sites.uk/terms.
Use the platform as a shop window if it still earns its cut. Just do not confuse the window with the house.
Key sources
- Booking.com Partner Hub, About our accommodation agreement, general delivery terms and Legal Entity ID. Contract with Booking.com B.V., GDT updated twice a year, PDF available from the extranet.
- Booking.com, General Delivery Terms text on the property registration pages. Parties, parity definitions (UK listed as a narrow parity country), commission on extras and overbookings, 14-day invoices, no partner cancellations, Dutch law, Amsterdam courts.
- Booking.com Partner Hub, A summary of the General Delivery Terms for accommodations in Europe. Ranking, reviews, partner promises. Summary is not the legal document.
- Booking.com Partner Hub, How parity works. No / narrow / wide regimes. Narrow: same or better rates and conditions as on the partner’s own online channels.
- Booking.com Partner Hub, Understanding your commission, and Handling cancellation fees and commission. Commission on collected cancellations, no-shows and overbookings. 48-hour extranet window. Overbooking waiver for new or rare cases.
- Booking.com Partner Hub, Payments by Booking.com and How costs work. No setup fee. Payment service fee on bank-transfer payouts. Commission deducted from payouts or invoiced monthly.
- Booking.com Partner Hub, Understanding the Genius marketing programme. Host-funded 10 per cent discount on cheapest and most popular unit, optional higher tiers.
- Booking.com Partner Hub, Partner Liability Insurance. UK limit £1 million. Home-like properties. Booking.com stays only. Does not cover the partner’s own property.
- Booking.com Partner Hub, UK Digital Platform Reporting Rules. Know Your Partner data for HMRC.
- Booking.com newsroom, legal claims and parity. Company position that it no longer uses parity clauses in the EEA.